


A Walk in the Park

by Xparrot



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Fluff, Homophobia, Intimidation, M/M, a little existential terror, but Cecil and Carlos are by default, maybe it's fluff, the themes aren't all fluffy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-21
Updated: 2014-02-21
Packaged: 2018-01-13 05:46:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1214953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Xparrot/pseuds/Xparrot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carlos doesn't know what to say. Cecil does.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Walk in the Park

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes instead of ranting on the internet I write fic instead. Please let me know if I cause offense; I'm not intending to make light of any issues here, but Night Vale encourages a certain sort of wish fulfillment.

Mission Grove Park was one of Carlos's favorite places in Night Vale. The Shape, while indescribable by law, was nonetheless fascinating to avoid contemplating. The legally observable trees offered intriguingly divergent results with every attempted measurement; it was nearly enough to make Carlos wish he were a dendrologist after all, instead of merely a scientist.

And of course the park was the secondary site of his and Cecil's first date, conferring it considerable sentimental value. Carlos found this subjective significance more difficult to quantify than any of the trees; further testing was required, and Cecil was always happy to oblige. So after their weekly Big Rico's meal they usually would take a walk in the park and do some light experiments on the trees and/or some light making out under the trees, depending on the mood, the weather, and the current legality of specific physical gestures.

The park was particularly popular of late. A recent topological shift in the local quantum field had opened temporary portals along most of its footpaths, offering transdimensional windows to changing locations around the globe. While the portals weren't big enough for human beings to cross, they did allow one to buy a hotdog from Coney Island or a box of noodles from a Bangkok streetcart, spacetime fluctuations and appropriate currency permitting.

Carlos and the other scientists had had several productive sessions tossing various instrumentation through the wormholes. They'd determined them to be mostly harmless, but had had no luck stabilizing any of them, to the dismay of the Night Vale Tourist Board. Though Cecil said and Carlos agreed that the portals' unpredictable and ephemeral nature was part of their charm, much like kittens, or tornados.

Today only a few portals had manifested, but otherwise it was a lovely evening; the void was a particularly aesthetic shade of vacuum, and every third tree was emitting a subsonic hum for unknown but doubtless interesting reasons. Carlos took recordings, with Cecil's able and eager assistance; he was thrilled to offer his audio expertise to the pursuit of science.

In between the tests on the trees, they strolled hand in hand, conversing and pausing here and there to listen to a didgeridoo player in Melbourne or enjoy the cool breeze blowing from interior Antarctica. 

They were under the branches of a denser copse when they encountered a trio of men, walking home from a sporting event, to tell by their caps and shirts. The colors were bright primaries and didn't include any hues outside the visible spectrum, unlike all the local teams; but Carlos wasn't paying attention to such details, engrossed as he was in Cecil recounting the antics of Khoshekh's brood.

So he didn't realize anything was amiss until Cecil offered their fellow pedestrians a friendly, "Good evening."

None of the men replied, except to glare sidelong as they stomped past, glowering but avoiding eye contact. Carlos was wondering if their team had lost, or possibly whether they were acquaintances of Steve Carlsberg, when he heard one of them mutter, lip curling, _"Disgusting."_

The man was eying Carlos as he said it—specifically Carlos's hand. Not his left hand holding his multimeter, but his right hand, clasping Cecil's.

Carlos started in unpleasant shock, jerking his hand out of Cecil's. Cecil stopped in his tracks, and Carlos's cognitive processes caught up with his autonomic nervous system. He felt his cheeks heat, stammered as he groped to reclaim Cecil's hand, "I—sorry, I didn't—"

Under the trees, Cecil's eyes were in shadow, but Carlos could feel his gaze—evaluating, judging, a judgment that mattered, unlike that of a few passing assholes. Before Carlos could offer a defense, Cecil turned his head toward the men walking away. "Excuse me," he said, calm but cutting through the rustle of leaves. "I didn't hear you clearly; can you repeat yourself?"

The three men stopped, turned back. The one who had spoken was the shortest, though still taller than Carlos or Cecil. His face was a pallid swatch in the twilight. He hesitated, then said, belligerently, "I said, _disgusting_."

"Ah," Cecil said, "then I did hear you; it's your meaning I'm unclear on. What exactly is disgusting?"

These men weren't local, Carlos belatedly realized. A glance at his multimeter confirmed the presence of a portal; they were transdimensional interlopers from the world outside Night Vale. "Never mind, Cecil," Carlos muttered, tugging at Cecil's hand, "let's just go—"

"Yeah, _Cecil_ , listen to your fairy boyfriend," sneered one of the other men, "go sin in your own places, where decent people don't have to see it."

Carlos twitched, his hand tightening around Cecil's. It wasn't the intended insult to him—the content was different, but the contempt was familiar from years of not being white, not liking sports, not accepting traditional scientific paradigms. To experience it for not being heterosexual was new but not unexpected.

But to hear Cecil so insulted—to hear his beautiful name twisted into that simpering whine, to see them sneer at his pure and earnest affection—that was unanticipated, the way it made Carlos's stomach turn, the way his teeth gritted and his heart pounded, to have Cecil exposed to this poison.

Since he had started going out with Cecil, Carlos had yet to encounter a single instance of homophobia in Night Vale. For that matter he had little evidence that homosexuality existed as a distinct concept in the community. Cecil never referred to himself as gay, though with the exception of a couple unrequited stalkers of unknown gender, species, and corporeality, all of Cecil's romantic experiences were with men, or at least beings who identified with the masculine. But he hadn't seemed surprised to learn that Carlos had gone out with women in the past.

Carlos had taken it for a Night Vale thing. In a town where a fist-sized river rock could be a college president, a five-headed dragon could run for mayor, and a young girl could have the body of an adult man's hand, trying to define sexual preferences based on such an inconsequential and fluid variable as gender would be an exercise in frustration.

So to explain this to Cecil—as much as Carlos normally enjoyed answering Cecil's questions about the outside world, or indeed any other topic, this conversation he was already dreading. "Come on, Cecil," he said, "forget it, they're just assholes—"

"We're the assholes?" one of the men said. "There are kids around here, you're parading your perversion in front of children!"

Cecil leaned closer to Carlos. The park's streetlamps were just flickering on; in the illumination between the tree branches, Cecil's expression wasn't angry, but not confused, either, for all his innocent tone. "Dear Carlos," he murmured with his exquisite control, too quietly to carry beyond Carlos's ears, "would you mind terribly, if I...?"

"If you...? Um, I guess not?"

Cecil smiled, all his teeth gleaming, and for a moment Carlos thought Cecil was going to kiss him, or possibly bite him.

Instead Cecil stepped away, not letting go of Carlos's hand, and turned toward the three men glowering on the path before them.

"So you believe this is a sin?" Cecil asked, his tone of polite inquiry. "A perversion, that I love this man, that he loves me?"

The three men looked at one another, taking encouragement from their numbers and size; then the tallest man said, "It's just wrong, it's going against nature."

"Whose nature? Because as to my own, I can assure you, it's natural to love someone who is beautiful, and brilliant, and courageous, and compassionate." Cecil was still smiling, squeezing Carlos's hand in his. "I should find it more unnatural not to love him."

"Love is love," the shortest man said, "but this is lust—it's a sin, a man lying with another man. If you really loved him you wouldn't damn him just for your own deviant desires."

Cecil inclined his head curiously. "So I shouldn't lie with him, but just lie to him, and tell him I don't desire him? Pretend that his beauty doesn't call to me, refuse to touch his delicate skin, to stroke his perfect hair, to kiss his strong jaw, when he wants me to do all those things and more? How would that be loving him, to deny him pleasure?"

"You can make it sound as pretty as you want," said the third man, "it's still abnormal."

"On that, we are agreed," Cecil said. His voice had dropped into the sonorous cadence of his radio broadcasts. "The universe is, normally, terrifying and unknowable. Existence is, most often, baffling and brutally arbitrary. And the vast, vast majority of people in the world do not and will never know you, no more than you know them; nor care in the least about you, as anything more than an abstract member of humanity.

"So to find, amidst those billions, even a single individual whose existence betters your own—whose aspect warms your heart or your body, whose company comforts you even in the face of the unfathomable universe, whose being makes you want to reach outside of the safe loneliness of self and draw them closer—and to have that person not only recognize you, but actually want you in return—that's the most abnormal and improbable and wonderful thing I can imagine."

Cecil paused. One of the men opened his mouth to speak, but Cecil said, with mild but undeniable emphasis, "I haven't finished," and he shut it again.

Night had fallen, abruptly, as it did in the desert, the purples of twilight plunging into black. Against that darkness, Cecil was a deeper shadow. The streetlight shining through the tree branches seemed to miss him, impossibly, as if the very light were bending around him. Carlos standing next to him could only see his silhouette, though Cecil's hand was still warm around his; Cecil's voice was warm around him, solid and engulfing, as tangible as the darkness.

"I can only hope," said that voice, "that you yourselves might someday find such joy in someone else. If you are so incredibly lucky as to find another person who is willing to love you as you love them—whether for one night, or a year, or a lifetime—then I can only hope that you'll have the strength and wisdom to accept that gift, however unnatural or sinful or abnormal you're told it is.

"Sincerely, this is what I hope for you; but hope is all I can have, and such optimism is a slim and brittle shield against the certainty of mortality. Whatever your faith, whatever you believe of an afterlife, the one truth we all share is that this life we live now will eventually end. And until the moment it does, you cannot know whether you will die forgotten or mourned, damned or forgiven, full of hate or full of joy. In this, we're all of us alike, so we can all pity one another, as we pity ourselves. 

Cecil released Carlos's hand as he took a step forward, out of the shade of the trees into the streetlamp's light, though the darkness clung to him despite the illumination pooling around his feet, shadows subtly writhing about his silhouetted figure. The three men he faced fell back a step in unison, recoiling from those twisting shades.

"We can hope for one another, as we hope for ourselves," Cecil said. "As I hope for you, that your hearts are not so small and fearful that you'll miss a chance for love if you encounter it. I hope that your lives will not be so brief that you'll never get that chance at all..."

He advanced a second step, to the edge of the portal, though that horizon was almost imperceptible if one didn't know what to look for. Silence had fallen with the night, the Antarctic wind ceasing as that portal closed, quieting the rustle of leaves. In that stillness the shortest man's gasp was audible as he cringed back, throwing up his hands before his eyes. "Your mouth—your _smile_ —what's—" 

The tallest man pointed wildly into the darkness over Cecil's shoulders, crying, "The sky—where are the stars? The sky's empty behind him—and those trees, those aren't the right trees—"

The third man's face was drained to the color of turned milk. He said nothing, just spun on his heel and started to sprint away.

Cecil took another step, and all three men vanished, as suddenly as a soap bubble popping, as the portal blinked out of reality.

Cecil turned back to Carlos. "I hope no secret police are nearby," he remarked, a bit abashed. "I technically used up my weekly allowance of evoking existential terror on today's traffic report."

"I'm not sure that terror counted as existential anyway," Carlos said. He blinked once and the shifting darkness around Cecil stilled, became only the striped shadows of branches crossing his face. "This...wasn't your first time dealing with people like that, was it."

"Hardly! Though it's been a while." Cecil stretched as luxuriously as a cat, uncoiling his spine vertebra by vertebra. "Thank you for indulging my nostalgia."

"Um, no problem," Carlos said. "I didn't know what I'd do anyway..."

Cecil cocked his head, studying Carlos with concern. "Oh dear—was this _your_ first time?"

"I suppose, yes?" Carlos admitted. "The first time the invective has been accurate, anyway....I think I mentioned, you're the first man I've actually dated." The others had been one-night-stands, emphasis on 'stand', mostly in the corners of frat parties and club bathrooms; none of them had ever asked Carlos out, and he hadn't thought to himself, not until Cecil.

"Of course," Cecil said, his face falling, "I should have realized—I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to steal the moment; it'd just been so long since I'd come across such invigoratingly pure, pointless hate in person. Letters and emails can't give the same satisfaction. But I shouldn't have been so selfish—"

"Cecil," Carlos interrupted, "it's all right. Honestly. I didn't mind at all. I wouldn't mind if you, um, stole all those moments. Though I'd rather neither of us had any again—is that really an issue in Night Vale? There are the occasional appropriative racists, and all the arguments about rites over rights for the undead; but I haven't observed that kind of prejudice against sexual preferences..."

"There's not much of it nowadays," Cecil said. "Not since I became the community radio host. Hatred is such a fragile thing, you know; it needs special conditions of misery to flourish, and rarely survives extended exposure to its source."

"But has it caused you trouble on your show, talking about me?" Carlos asked. "Not because it's personal business, but because I'm a man, and you..."

Cecil shrugged. "The station's gotten a few letters of complaint. Mostly people who don't remember updates to the decency statutes, or pretend they don't."

 _And I fell in love instantly_ , Carlos remembered, bare and bold and unhesitating, like it was the easiest thing in the world to say. He remembered, too, the year it had taken himself to get up the courage to ask Cecil to meet him in the parking lot. "I...didn't know. I wish I'd realized that you were dealing with that." 

"Carlos," Cecil said, caressing his cheek, "I get letters complaining about _everything_. It's part of being a public figure. That jerk Steve Carlsberg faxes me at least one after every broadcast! For all the letters about you, I've gotten way more about coming across as anti-homicide—even though I've only been reporting the new laws as enacted; I've got no horse in that race."

"But why didn't you tell me? You've never mentioned getting any letters about me."

Cecil dropped his hand, his eyes sliding away from Carlos's. "Because...most of the letters about you are worse than archaic bigotry."

"...Worse?" Cecil squirmed like another unruly shadow. Carlos folded his arms. "Cecil..."

Cecil sighed. "People ask you out. A lot of people, men and woman and everyone else. More before you started dating me—everybody wanted me to give you their phone number, or give them yours. Now it's only a few a month, but still...and I know I _should_ have showed them to you, but some of them were from poets, or politicians, or millionaires, or even other scientists; and I'm just a community radio host..."

"You're not _just_ that, Cecil," Carlos said, shaking his head. "You're not _just_ anything."

Cecil peeked up at him, his lashes casting delicate shadows over his cheeks. "I'm not?"

Carlos cupped Cecil's face in his hands. "Scientifically speaking," he said, "you're a fearless, insightful, gorgeous, and talented community radio host, who against all probability and logic fell in love with a perfectly ordinary scientist who marvels daily at his incredible good luck. And who actually really enjoyed seeing you terrify the crap out of those bigoted assholes, but would like to go home now before any more show up."

Cecil glanced around at the trees. "So you're done with your experiments?"

"Hardly," Carlos said, leaning forward. He couldn't actually remember whether mouth-to-mouth contact on footpaths after dark was currently legal, but at this moment tickets be damned. "But there are more interesting things to test than trees."

And from the way Cecil kissed him back, he quite agreed.

**Author's Note:**

> I've seen several fics where Cecil has never encountered or heard of homophobia. But given his awareness of racism, I'm not sure he's so innocent. (Though of course with Cecil no interpretation is that improbable.)


End file.
